I'm really excited about Koinos and the concepts proposed for a better blockchain.
But at the same time many questions came to my mind trying to learn from the past.
I hope the dev team can take a look at them, and the community as well.
Not open source contracts
I have a conflict with the term "Smart Contract". Both in eos and ethereum you can deploy a smart contract being the source code not open source. That is, the parties that interact with it can not read it, they can only use it. If you can not read the content, is it correct to call it "contract"?
I know that this logic of not being open source protects the intellectual property of the devs that create them, and more companies can be attracted to create more smart contracts, which increase users, investors, and value in general. However, at the same time I enter in conflict with the philosophy of blockchain in terms of transparency.
The problem I see is that the community, step by step, are accepting not open source dApps. See for example defibox. It is the #1 dApp on Eos and it is not open source. But they provide certificates from third parties showing that the code have been audited. This means that the trust comes from third parties, which is a bit disappointing because we are in a blockchain. And without mention that dapps can update the code, which invalidates the certificate (defibox with +50 versions deployed, which is normal in software development: you find bugs you fix it).
What is the position of Koinos in this topic?
Vote buying
When Eos was launched it was decided to create new tokens at rate of 1% annual to pay block producers. Ideally, block producers should compete between them giving better performance, storage, and bandwith. However, the free market has led to block producers to distribute part of their income to those that have voted for them. Proxies have become agents that search for the better profit for the delegators behind them.
A recent research have found that some top block producers have issues with the performance, but as the vote buying is the pattern used to select the producers then they are not changed.
A counterargument to this behaviour prefers to call it voter rebates saying that this drives the value back to token holders, which in the end levels the playin field, and block producers compete in costs.
What do you think? Should this pattern be or not to be supported?
Worker Proposal System
Eos blockchain was conceived to have a worker proposal system, creating new tokens at rate of 4% annual for this purpose.
However, the code for the proposal system was still in development. Then this 4% was accumulating little by little in a savings account.
When the community saw that a vote buying mechanism was being used to select block producers the critics started around this 4% for proposals, stating that the vote buying could continue there as well, and the main objective of the proposal system may be broken.
At the end the community decided to remove the proposal system. In the research of Binance they say that this decision unfortunately gave more control to block producers since now all new tokens are for them.
On the other hand, other blockchains like hive, telos, or dash, have this proposal system working and I'm not aware of issues related to vote buying.
Does koinos plan to use a proposal system? Do you think vote buying is a risk there?